It’s budget season. Again, security is being questioned, scrutinized or stripped.
If you are a CISO or security leader, you will notice that the program explains why it is important, why certain tools or personnel are essential, and why the next violation is one blind spot. However, these discussions are often lacking unless framed in a way that the board can understand and appreciate.
Gartner’s analysis shows that 88% of boards view cybersecurity as a business risk rather than an IT issue, but many security leaders still struggle to raise the profile of cybersecurity within their organizations. For security issues to resonate among boards, they need to speak the language of business continuity, compliance and cost impacts.
Below we present some strategies that will help you frame the conversation, transforming technology and complexity into clear business directives.
Recognize high interests
Cyber threats continue to evolve from ransomware and supply chain attacks to advanced, persistent threats. Both large and medium sized organizations are targeted. The business impact of violations is important. It disrupts operations, damages reputation and suffers substantial penalties. To avoid this, organizations need to adopt proactive approaches such as ongoing threat exposure management. Continuous validation with frequently automated testing helps identify new attack vectors before they escalate.
Align your security strategy with business goals
The board does not approve security budgets based on fear or uncertainty. They want to see how your strategy protects revenue, maintains uptime and supports compliance. That means converting technical goals into results that match your business initiatives. Define measurable KPIs as time to detect or modify measurable KPIs, and place roadmap along with upcoming projects such as rolling out and merging and retrieving new systems.
Build a risk-focused framework
When you request more budgets, prioritization should be shown. This starts with identifying and categorizing core assets, customer data, proprietary systems, and infrastructure. If possible, quantify that violations can cost your business. This helps define acceptable risk thresholds and guide your investments.
One of its clients, the US-based insurance provider, estimated that violations of the policyholder database, which holds many customer PIIs, could cost more than $5 million in regulatory fines and loss of revenue. This prediction helped them prioritize vulnerabilities that could lead to this asset and validate surrounding security controls. By focusing security efforts on high-value assets, they were able to enhance their security where it mattered most and show the board exactly why the investment was justified.
Use industry standards to enhance your case
Regulations and frameworks such as ISO 27001, NIST, HIPAA, PCI DSS and more are allies that can help you make your point. They provide a baseline for good security hygiene and give leadership familiar things to lock in their decisions. However, compliance does not guarantee security. It uses audit feedback to highlight gaps and demonstrates how verification can add a layer of actual protection.
Jay Martin, CISO at Cofco International, shared on a recent panel at Pentera Hosts, “we were building budget requests on best practices, but they showed where they were exposed and how quickly they could fix it.”
Create a business case standing in the executive office
Security ROI is more than just cost savings. It is to avoid losses, violations, downtime, legal penalties and brand damage. Automated security verification shows an early victory by revealing exposures traditional tools have missed. These include misunderstandings, excessive permissions, and credentials that have leaked credentials that have been proven to be exploitable in the environment. This proves the possibility of an attack before it actually occurs. This kind of evidence shows exactly where the risk lies and how quickly it can be corrected. This gives leadership a clear reason to expand the program, expanding security as a business enabler and simply a cost center.
Communicate with appropriate messages for each audience
The board wants to understand how security decisions affect your business, whether it protects revenue, avoids regulatory penalties and reduces financial fallout of violations. Security teams need operational details. Filling that gap is part of your role. Adjust the messages for each group and use real examples where possible. Organizations in similar industries share stories about whether they were affected or succeeded by missteps thanks to their aggressive investments. Shows how your plans create coordination between departments and create a culture of shared accountability.
Be ahead of new threats in real tests
Cyberattacks evolve quickly. The threat that last quarter did not exist may be the biggest risk of today. Therefore, security verification must be ongoing practice. The attacker is not waiting for your quarterly review cycle, and you should not both defend yourself. Frequently automated penetration testing helps you discover blind spots across infrastructure, cloud environments, and partner systems.
Continuous testing also allows you to show the board exactly how ready you are to prepare for current threats, especially the high-profile threats that dominate the headline. Tracking how an organization endures these threats over time gives us a clear way to show progress. This level of transparency helps build confidence and move conversations from fear and uncertainty to preparation and measurable improvements.
Avoid waste of budget
Too many security investments will turn into shelfware. Not because of the bad tools, but because of underused use, inadequate integration, or lack of clear ownership. Make sure each solution is mapped to a specific need. Not only does it have a license, but it also has a training and operational support budget. Regular tool audits help streamline your efforts, reduce redundancy, and focus on where you deliver the most value.
Complete your scalable, defensive budget plan
The strongest budget plan destroys spending by category: prevention, detection, response, and validation, and how each area contributes to a larger image.
Shows how your plans will expand in your business so that every decision will continue to deliver value. To support the expansion into new regions, global manufacturers have used automated security verification to establish best practices for strengthening their assets and configuring security controls. We included continuous validation from the start, avoiding the high cost of manual testing and operational tensions in allocating additional resources. Most importantly, they maintained a strong security stance throughout their expansion by revealing and improving actual exposures before attackers exploit them.
Takeout: Prove the business value of security
Security is no longer a cost center, it is a growth enabler. Continuous testing of control shifts conversations from assumptions to evidence. The evidence is what the board wants to see.
Use the standard for your benefit. Show that you will not only meet expectations, but also actively reduce risk. And most of all, we continue to insist that wise and ongoing investment in cybersecurity will protect today’s business and build resilience for tomorrow.
Beyond one-off audits and annual reviews, check out our goat guide on how to communicate risk to the board. It shows you how to use continuous validation to not only protect your organization, but also to prove that your security strategy is working.
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